Communications today involve a plethora of hardware and software components from a wide variety of manufacturers. In addition, messages originate from and are intended for a multitude of individuals, groups or organizations. The need for efficient and consistent identification of recipients for a message is essential to the success and usefulness of these communication components. In particular, a convenient and easy to use system and method is needed to correctly identify one or more recipients. Such a system and method should not rely on human memory of such abstract things as e-mail addresses or exact names. The average individual is already tasked today with associating and remembering too many pieces of information relating to both themselves and others. For example, there is the host of phone numbers—work, home, cell and pager, e-mail address, residence and business address, pin numbers, social security number, passwords for various computing systems or websites and so on. The ability to correctly recall each of these pieces of information about one's self can become quite unwieldy. When further tasked with remembering e-mail addresses or specific names for contacts to whom messages are sent, the burden is even further increased.
In the context of messaging with a computing device, such as sending e-mail on a computer system, it is often difficult in light of some of the reasons discussed above for a user to remember the exact name or e-mail address of one or more contacts for whom a message is intended. To overcome this problem, messaging systems that are currently in use enable a user to view and ultimately select one or more message recipients from a previously specified address book or from a list of all the users and groups within a particular organization. Regardless of the source of the list, the user is then required to scroll through the list and hopefully encounters a name or some other identifier that aides in jogging the user's memory so as to identify an intended recipient.
To overcome this long list and the associated search problem, some messaging systems present the user with a ‘pick list’. Such a ‘pick list’ is a list that is limited to the last X number of mail recipients, sorted according to some predetermined order or user specified order. Such sort orders vary but include alphabetic ordering.
In each of these previous attempts to resolve the problem of recipient identification the systems all fail to address or account for the fact that in some cases an entry in a user's address book may be stale. A stale address or reference refers to a recipient whom the user no longer e-mails or e-mails on a very infrequent basis. Furthermore, in the case of systems that track and count recent messages, there is the possibility of a false weighting. For instance during a particular period in time, such as the closing of a business deal, a user may have had reason to communicate frequently with a particular recipient. However, once the transaction is completed, the user may never have reason to contact that recipient again. However, ‘recent message systems’ that are currently available will still assign a heavy weighting to that recipient. In such cases, as far as the system is concerned, that recipient has received recent e-mails albeit a temporary situation, as such that recipient will be included within the ‘pick list’ and assigned a high priority.
The issues raised with regards to existing messaging systems essentially relate to the fact that such systems provide a listing of most recent or most selected contacts rather than most likely contacts. Furthermore, the operation of current systems require the systems to keep endless array lists or lookup tables of all e-mailed addresses that are ever selected on a system, along with the associated count for each sent message to each recipient. Such requirements necessitate large storage capabilities by a system.
The need to disseminate and access information, and more critically the role that information plays in today's society, necessitate that information be centralized for ease of access and require that the integrity and security of such information be ensured.
In light of the foregoing, there exists a need to provide a system and method that will enable the identification of message recipients. More importantly, such identification would be based on the most likely recipients as determined by examining the frequency of selection of a particular recipient, recency of such selection and other such criteria that will provide a stable, consistent and easy to use address pick-list. Furthermore, there exists a need for a method of easily making such a ‘pick-list’ accessible to a user. Even further, there exists a need for a system and method that accomplishes the aforementioned objects without requiring or utilizing large volumes of storage.